THE brilliance of John Cleese as hapless hotelier Basil Fawlty may have been sparked by his mental health battles at the time, says top actor Mark Gatiss.

Watch the first episode of Fawlty Towers and John Cleese is so visibly mentally ill, he's got massive rings around his eyes and he's so sick and the whole show is infused with his manic anger - that's why it's so brilliant.

Mark Gatiss

Gatiss, who co-stars in and pens the scripts for award-winning TV series Sherlock, claimed part of Cleese's genius in Seventies TV comedy Fawlty Towers came from the demons he had.

"Watch the first episode of Fawlty Towers and John Cleese is so visibly mentally ill, he's got massive rings around his eyes and he's so sick and the whole show is infused with his manic anger - that's why it's so brilliant."

In a gentle sideswipe he added: "Then John Cleese got better and you can't deny that it's not as funny."

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Last night a spokesman for Cleese declined to comment on Gatiss's remarks.

The BBC's Fawlty Towers series, centring on the Torquay seaside hotel run by the inept, manic Basil and his long-suffering wife Sybil, played by Prunella Scales, ran from 1975 to 1979.

All 12 episodes penned by Cleese, now 78, and his then wife Connie Booth, who played chambermaid Polly, have remained as popular today as when they were first aired.

Viewers loved watching as Basil constantly struggled to inject a touch of class into his surroundings, with hilarious results. But Cleese once revealed TV bosses had to be convinced the show would be a success.

He said: "When we handed the first script in, the guy in charge of evaluating it wrote a memo that I have framed.

"It says, 'It is full of cliched situations and stereotypical characters and I cannot see it being anything other than a total disaster'.

"The show was good because we took six weeks to write every episode. Nobody takes that long now, most people take 10 days or a week. There was no temptation to do another series - we knew we would fail because we had set the bar too high."